From Pine View Farm

Artificial? Yes. Intelligent? Not So Much. 0

At Psychology Today Blogs, William Poundstone looks at the current hoopla over AI and puts it in context by recalling the Turing test and, later, a computer program called ELIZA, which was capable of carrying on limited conversations via text.

One passage in particular caught my eye. Poundstone cites a comment by MIT computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum, the creator of ELIZA, reacting to how willing persons were to think of ELIZA as sentient:

Yet Weizenbaum was astounded at how many people found its canned statements convincing. “What I had not realized,” he wrote, “is that extremely short exposures to a relatively simple computer program could induce powerful delusional thinking in quite normal people.”

One wonders what Weizenbaum might say today.

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